As an international student from China, I really like the diversity here. In my eyes, we have a fantastic community - IST: our people have different cultures and backgrounds. During the past one year, this diversified climate always stimulates my desire to learn , to communicate and to share with others.



Culture is the essence of a nationality. In culture, there are spirits, beliefs and legends. I took culture as my interest since I was a kid and I always regard learning different cultures as one of my most enjoyable activities. I would like to know what makes a nationality unique and what they believe in. From the image below, we can observe the different aspects regarding to a culture. Among those I prefer the aspects of art, street life and architecture.

Graduate school provides me a great environment to know people from other countries. Implicitly, this also gives me good opportunities to learn different cultures. I have made friends from Thailand, Korea, America, and Europe. When chatting with them, we made many funny moments, result from the differences among cultures. For example, American student always cannot understand why college students in China rarely go to bars. Actually, they are very surprised when hearing this. Then, I need to explain to them the reasons, related to Chinese policies and Chinese education. Through this explanation, both of us can get a better understanding about not only the cultures, but also the people and the countries. I  like this free and interactive communication style and it really brought me a lot of happiness.

Everyone has his/her own way to organize the graduate study and life. As for me, graduate life gives me a brand new experience. Before and after I joined graduate school, I changed a lot. I changed from a child to an adult, I changed from a student to a scholar, and above all, I changed from a knowledge-receiver to a continuous thinker. Graduate study gives me so many hints for my own life and it really stimulates my enthusiasm for exploring, thinking and communicating. To summarize, this period really helps me to know who I am, what I want to do, and which way I should go.



This is my way to lead my graduate life.
1) Hard working. I want to say that no matter which phase you are at, the basic thing for graduate students is doing good jobs. We need to work hard and show that we are capable enough to do thing well.
2) Making friends. There is a saying in China: you can rely on your family when you are near them, but when you far from them, the only thing you can rely on is your dear friends. This is very true. Friends is the most important part of my life and I always treat them as my families.
They do always support me when I need help and they never made me feel lonely.
3) Communication. As for me, I think communication is an integral skills for one to head to success. Through chatting with others, I found I can learn so much from them, communication skills, the experiences and most of all, the opportunities. It is also a saying in China: among three persons, at lease one can be your teacher. 
4) Writing. To be honest, I do not like writing, but recently I forced me to write regularly. I have realized the importance of it. In my viewpoint, if one cannot write, it means that he has lost the entrance to impress and record himself.
5) Finally, I like Good food, Good sleep, and Good play. I hope Enjoy myself and Look for fun. But before that, I always checked if I have done all the jobs that I should do.

This is a picture of a museum located in Japan, do you like it?

Logo PK -- How to design a logo

It is not only simple PKs, but also the reasons why some wins.

I think it is better to put this entry before the "Design 1" ^_^

Here is a famous diagram to show three aspects related to a good design. When we are turning our head to human as IST, we still should not ignore the significances of market and technology. We should always keep in mind if our works could meet the market's requirements and if the technology is available to support the working process? By the way, LoL.... <--  This "LOL" is a good design.... :)

"A great design could be art; but art can never be designed which is rooted in you." -- Kun 

If you are a fish lover, have you thought to go shopping with your friends?

Here it is !!
It is design by: Michal Shabtiali

Here I want to introduce two researchers who I am interested in, one is MacEarchearn and another is Zipf.


Alan MacEachearn is one of the top scientists of geography, a professor in Geography Department in Penn State. Through his academic life till now, he made much contributions to  GIS community, both from theoretical/methodological and technical perspective. As for me, his work helps me to gain a big picture about GIS -- how does it emerge, how does it progress along time and what is the challenging now. Besides, I am also impressed by  his attitude to science. He is such a serious guy and spent most time in a day doing research. Though I may not think that is not a good way for living, but that makes me honor him. In my life, I always choose someone to be my "idol" for me to catch up with. And now, he is one of them.

Compared to Alan, Zipf's work is more specified, focusing on mobile GIS. I interested in him because what he is doing is very similar to what I want to do. He aims to integrate context-awareness, personalization and GI service into a mobile GIS system, thus to provide users adaptive information and interface based on the real-time situation.
 

Till now, I have participated in two academic communities: one is GeoVista center and another is CSCL Lab.

GeoVISTA is a professional GIS communities comprising of professors and students from both GEOG and IST. It is one of the most prominent GIS communities all of the world, aiming to solving a wide range of GIS related problems, including technical ones and psychological ones. From this community, I can obtain and update my knowledge of my research area, and it provides a great climate for making research progress.

I was also involved in CSCL Lab in our department. It is a psychological centered community and tries to analysis user-computer interaction problems from a psychology background. From this community, I gained another kind of knowledge -- psychology, and began to use theories from this perspective to support my research.

In current days when multi-disciplinary research areas emerge from anywhere, communities following one certain direction could no longer satisfied the multi-disciplinary exportation. As my observation, most of our classmates around me are taking participate in communities from several areas. I think this is especially important for us who are from IST, which is inheretly multi-natually structrued. 

Bo is a 3th year graduate student in my lab. We have the same advisor - Guoray Cai, and his research does also focus on GIS. In my view, he is a real technical guy who experts in lots of computer skills. In the first year of my PHD study, he helps me a lot, letting me know what I should know about GIS, and what should I do as a phd student.

In this year, August, he passed his comprehensive exam, with the topic concerning with adaptive GIS. He aims to implement a GIS system adopting adaptive theory, in order to make the system being aware of  ongoing dialogues among people and futhermore, participate in dicision-making process.

Till now, he has publish several good papers, including:
1. A Query-Aware Document Ranking Method for Geographic Information Retrieval, GIR Workshop 2007', CIKM, Lisbon, Portugal
2. Research on Spatial Data Access Middleware. Computer Engineering and Applications, April 2005, 178-181.
3. Modeling Fuzzy Spatial Objects Using Design Patterns. Presented at International Symposium on Spatial Data Quality 2004, Vienna, Austria

About our similarity, I think we are both technical guy, both from China. But compared with him, I lack some working and research experience.